Social networking systems, usually embodied in social networking websites, are a popular means for individuals and entities to interact with one another remotely within a virtual environment. Social networking systems generally display each user with a list of other subscribers of the system. The displayed list may include an alias, picture, and brief other information about other subscribers. To interact with another subscriber of a conventional social networking system, the current user may select one of the other subscribers, and may resultantly be directed to a profile page of the selected subscriber. From the profile page, the current user may be able to perform various operations to interact with the selected subscriber.
A drawback of conventional social networking systems is their inability to provide users with means to efficiently facilitate subscriber interactions. By requiring a current user to visit another subscriber's profile page before accessing most potential interaction operations, conventional systems do not make efficient use of available interactions. Some social networking systems attempt to address this problem by allowing users to utilize predetermined system-defined shortcuts to interact with other subscribers without visiting profile pages. These system-defined shortcuts, however, may not embody the interactions most useful to individual system users.
Therefore, there is a need for a networking system that enables a user to customize shortcuts for interacting with other subscribers. In an exemplary embodiment, the user can categorize subscribers and customize shortcuts that vary between subscriber categories, so as to interact differently with different subscriber categories. It is to such networking systems that various embodiments of the present invention are directed.